The Ironies of the Day

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If You Like Palin But Think She Can't Win, Guess What? The Media Wins.

It's an ongoing narrative. People believe there is this groundswell of dislike for Sarah Palin. The same media pundits push it. The same left wing publications push it. The same GOP Establishment people push it. It's a myth, people. It's a psychological ploy to get you to believe that Sarah Palin can't win because she is not popular enough, too polarizing or just not qualified.

There are people who say they like Sarah Palin, but they don't think she can win. Ask these people if the media has hurt her chances to become president and they will tell you yes. Then they will tell you she can't win because she's damaged goods. Okay, which is front here, the cart or the horse?

Alan Reasin, a 65-year old retired nuclear power plant engineer from Conowingo, Md and who is on the steering committee of the Cecil County Tea Party Patriots told the Daily Caller "She’s got too many negatives, not for me, but for too many people."

Where are all these people for whom Palin has too many negatives? We need spines, people.

Where are all the Palin haters voting against Bristol on Dancing With the Stars? They don't exist. Where are all these new anti-Palin blogs popping up everywhere? They don't exist. Why? Because there is no AstroTurf campaign underway right now. When she runs, you watch how many screennames and blog titles people in their pajamas are able to get.

Our numbers are real. Trust our numbers. Should Palin run, damn the torpedoes. Forget the media. THE MEDIA LIED TO YOU and now they want to subliminally get you to give up.

If in fact those who like her but don't think she can win because of the above mentioned reasons, then the media wins. All those lies, smears, hit pieces and nonsense being spewed out in the pop culture will be a worthy venture for the liberals who have pulled out all the stops to prevent her from becoming the next Ronald Reagan.

Don't let that happen.

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Check out my Townhall Blog:
Why Didn’t the American Economy Just Go to Rehab Two Years Ago?

Keep an eye on this story, it bears watching:
Deafening silence: MSM fails to report explosive Obama scandal

When Dealing with the Media in Rome…

One used to wonder what the crowd reaction in ancient Rome would have been if the Christians beat the lions, especially given how their media was so biased against the Christians. But, we found out how that would have gone Sunday night when 5 million people cheered for Sarah Palin’s Alaska while the rest of the media was still in shock that she would even dare step into the arena. Despite all the media hits leading up to the airing of the show, the lions never stood a chance.

Renee James at the Daily Caller takes on the modern media by using Parker – Spitzer and Sarah Palin’s Alaska as examples of what’s wrong with the media when people who should supposedly “fade out of the national consciousness” are given a forum from which “you can’t be missed if you never go away.”

A commenter, goldie, stands up for Sarah Palin and calls James’ column “boneheaded.” Yes it is boneheaded to use a piece like that to criticize Palin especially since James is making a more valid point about the game rather than the player. She starts from a good point, but just doesn’t go into why it is that way or why she uses Palin as her example.

There is one cynical point that will always saddle this blogger’s otherwise positive forward looking nature: we are an American Idol society. It is not the dealer, but rather the user who is driving up the demand for this kind of media drug.

The American people are resilient. They respond to adversity well. They help their fellow man. They desire the best for their families and friends. But if there is one thing that will cause me to stumble into the room of intellectual elitism, if only but briefly, it’s that the American people are dumb as stumps when it comes to what they watch on TV.

We can take down kings, kaisers, communists, emperors and fuehrers. We can build the best products. We are faithful – we go to church and believe in God. We join hands during times of national emergencies. But put us in front of a television set and it’s moron time at the zoo.

Many would rather be immersed in the fantasies of daytime soap operas than dealing with the realities of their own problems. They escape by watching movies where buildings blow up and people are covered in soot and blood, but quickly forget the reality of what happened on 9/11.

Maybe they’re just watching the wrong “reality.” There’s nothing wrong with reality TV. I love watching sports. The competition is real. I watch the news. The news is real. I watch the weather. The weather is real. Americans can call what they watch reality TV, but what they’re watching is really fantasy TV. They’d rather be on the Jersey Shore than in Sarah Palin’s Alaska. That’s the problem.

More young people today get their news from Stephen Colbert than they do from regular news outlets. They get their opinions of celebrities and politicians through tabloids and from the late night talk shows more so than by actually meeting or seeing them in person, researching them properly or even seeing them as real people rather than the personas that the media try to portray them as.

Getting back to the American Idol society, it’s important to note with no cynicism pushed aside, that reality is reality. Wishing that everyone would stop feeding their brains this junk won’t make it go away. Just being critical or judgmental will not solve the problem. The only way to solve the problem is to infiltrate it and let some of what our side has to say seep in. As long as we walk the earth, we will always have to breathe its air. Let’s start making it smell better.

Since we cannot end the American appetite for mind numbing TV then let’s at least take a look at what is being served and see if we can’t offer something better. We forget that what’s in the idiot box IV bag that feeds the mental bloodstream is not the harmless saline solution it may look like. When taken directly from screen to brain, the concoction of sexualization, glorification of violence and caricaturing of personas and values that results in our passive submission to the views fed to us by a mostly a liberal medium leads us to do and think stupid things – like telling people that Sarah Palin is dumb because we believe she said she can see Russia from her house or voting for Obama because we think he’ll govern as a moderate.

Junk in will always equals junk out. Just as you are what you eat, you are also what you put into your brain. With thousands of channels (it used to be 13, and we all know what Roger Waters wrote about those in the Pink Floyd song “Nobody Home”), there is so much out there to infiltrate the mind. We just need to get more of a market share.

It needs to be explained to Renee James that Sarah Palin’s Alaska exists because of shows like Parker – Spitzer. When Kathy Griffin goes on the rubber chicken circuit to poke fun at the Palins and to talk about Levi’s Johnston, it makes more sense why Bristol Palin is on Dancing With the Stars. Complain all you want about how you hate sword fighting, but don’t use the Palins as an example for your argument if all they’re doing is pulling out their swords to take on an enemy that has already unsheathed.

James complains about the media culture by rebuking its players. But she misses it by not understanding a game that will not go away just because she or anyone else says so. Constructive engagement is the only way to tame it.

Palin's use of the media to reach out to the pop culture and to non-traditional news viewers is as easy to understand as the damage that was done by the late night talk shows and Tina Fey. It also helps to offset the left wing media's caricature of her as shallow. Shallow people don't do all the work that Sarah Palin has done. In a nutshell, Palin's appearances on Fox News, radio shows like Bob and Mark and in her documentary Sarah Palin's Alaska (as well as Bristol's appearances on Dancing With the Stars) is her way of telling the left wing culture taste my nightstick!
 It is befitting our American Idol society that Bristol Palin goes on Dancing With the Stars. It is befitting that the writer of a Conde Naste hit piece gets abused on Palin’s show. Regardless of what you think of Renee James’s complaint, the existential fact remains. It’s just a game. All we can do is play.

So when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Just be better at it than they are if you want to win.

Another "GOP Strategist" Beclowns Himself in the LA Times

In a well written article by Matea Gold at the LA Times, she gives a fair and balanced assessment of Sarah Palin's Alaska. She quotes different opinions, some more favorable, some less. But you get a gist of the potential that Sarah Palin's Alaska has not only as a documentary, but as a great way for people to get to know her better.

Starring in her own reality show is a canny way to play to a public skeptical of the traditional press, said Michael Maslansky, chief executive of maslansky luntz + partners, which researches how people respond to forms of communication.

"As a form of political media, this is quite possibly the evolution of the personal biography," he said...

The only really out of whack statement in her article comes from supposedly one of ours, "GOP strategist" Scott Reed  who beclowns himself (particularly after Palin's speech about Quantitative Easing) by dribbling this all over himself:

 "If Palin is going to be serious about affecting the terms of the debate in the Republican Party, and I think she is," Reed said, "she's probably better off doing some deep dives on policy, rather than rock climbing."

It's the last sentence of the article. Journalists use an inverted pyramid structure to their articles so that in the event the article has to be edited or cut for space, the least important stuff is at the end of the article. This quote made it, unfortunately, for Mr. Reed who will probably not have any future in a new Republican party if the insiders and the Establishment continue to alienate the rank and file the way they have since Steve Schmidt puked all over himself following the 2008 election.

CNN: John Ziegler vs. Kathleen Parker on Obama, Palin

John Ziegler clearly lands it on CNN's the Parker-Spitzer show.

Read more here.

Dance Little Sister

“They’re going to criticize me no matter what I do, so I might as well dance.” – Bristol Palin

"Yes, they’ll criticize us no matter what, so I might as well climb and fly and trek and build and hunt and fish and share with you the awe-inspiring beauty of Alaska...and because I wanted my family along for the ride, I want your family to come along, too. Follow me there!" – Sarah Palin

Follow Me There! (To Alaska!)

Race car great Mario Andretti once said, “If everything’s under control then you’re going too slow.” In Alaska, we have two speeds in the summertime: fast and faster – that’s because Alaskan summers are so short and sweet. We always try to cram it all in before the leaves change and snow flies again. Seasons change so quickly up here that we’re full-speed ahead to capture every minute under the Midnight Sun doing what we love to do in the great outdoors.

read more here.

Keep up with the Conservatives4Palin Meet and Greet:

Thomas S. Schmitz

Tammy Bruce

Jedediah Bila

SE Cupp

Karen Allen

Look, I wasn't going to say this, but....

The Establishment is the reason why we didn't get more Senate seats.

I really didn't want to say that. I consider myself a good Republican, a Reagan Republican. I don't believe in speaking ill of other Republicans. I don't believe that you do intra-party fighting the same way you do inter-party fighting. I believe you stay positive and play as a team.

It bothers me that some Republicans in the party and in the media found it necessary to downplay or criticize certain candidates or try to pin blame on Sarah Palin, Jim Demint or the Tea Party for not winning the Senate.

Before you nail me for the first sentence of this article, let me point out that it was just illustrating a point. We can blame it on each other if we want to. But in reality, if we are a tight party, no one in the party cost us the Senate. We lost it together - just like we won the house, governorships or state legislatures together.

We weren't supposed to win the Senate, anyway. Our objective was to take the House and keep going as far as we could. We did that. We picked up 6 seats in the Senate. Good job guys. We kicked their asses.

Now let's enjoy our holidays and wait til we reach a point after the new year where candidates start announcing. Folks, be true to your horse. But don't come out of your lane and bump the other horses. This is not Conservative on Liberal combat. That's serious stuff - and we need to use everything in our arsenal for them not on each other.

We are the grown ups. We have an opportunity to show the negative, nasty, smear minded liberals that we're not like them. We need to sell to the American people that when the GOP wins the White House in 2012, that they can have confidence in a leader who takes a more mature approach toward governing. Putting the adults in charge is a pretty good selling point on the campaign trail.

We need to blow them out intellectually. We need to do what Sarah Palin did this week with her widely praised analysis on Quantitative Easing. They are not the intellectual elite. They are a bunch of sniveling bomb throwers, name callers and fact twisters. We have the truth and, yes, we are going to look intellectually smart if we articulate it properly.

They're going to go back to the old playbook and run parodies about Sarah Palin. That's played. The people see through it now. Now, convince us of a positive, libs. Convince us why socialism is so great.

If you can't do that, step aside.

You see, our vision of the future of this country is one in which the "governed class" is weened off the teat of big government. The more we can do for ourselves, the more free we will be. Whoever can deliver on that (okay, you know who I think that is, but run with me on this), should be our leader.

There is no other way. It's always been that way throughout history. All conflicting philosophies have failed. For those who believe in evolution, limited Constitutional government the way our Founders set forth is the winner in the survival of the fittest war. It is both Darwinian and Divine. This combination should tell anyone with a half a brain that it's the direction we should be going.

Tonight, Karl Rove praised Sarah Palin for giving a strong speech in Phoenix on quantative easing. It's a start. He gave a fair analysis of the pending race for 2012. It's a start.

So, it is with great hope and great faith that instead of pointing fingers at each other, Republicans, that we keep the finger pointed where it needs to be: statist liberalism.

I know the candidates will have to point out certain things about other candidates in the primary. That's cool. Be classy, though. Let's run a good race and let the best person win. If we do it right, the party will be strong - a beast. If we do it wrong, we will have to patch wounds, limp in after a long hard race and try to figure out what went wrong in time to run an effective campaign for the general election.

Onward to victory.

Open Thread: Great Reads For the Day

There's no need to write a new post today because what has been written is already well done, and does not to be re-written.

I have one comment, though, that I would like those who have come to this post to keep in mind. Is Sarah Palin riding a wave toward triumph or what?

This week will be Conservatives4Palin's meet and greet. You can follow it at the Conservatives4Palin website. Tammy Bruce, SE Cupp, Jedediah Bila and a bunch of other big names will be there. Thomas S. Schmitz of Palin Promotions is there and he is covering it as well: C4P Chicago Meet-up: The Early Birds Prequel.

Also, keep this thought in mind as well. Are we willing to deal with a failed Republican Establishment when we the rank and file have the real ideas about conservatism and are asking our representatives to stick to principle?

Read today's Human Events column by Jedediah Bila: Principles over Party

Dan Riehl at Big Journalism:
Memo to Michael Gerson: Republicans Defeated Castle, Not Palin
Media Acknowledges Obama’s Declining Influence

Doug Brady at Conservatives4Palin:
No, Governor Palin Did Not Cost the GOP the Senate

Michelle Malkin:
Tina Fey recycles Palin rape kit lie

New York Sun:
Sarah Palin’s Seoul

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:
Obama fails to get G-20 to scold China for what Obama is doing with QE2

James Lewis at American Thinker:
Great Nations Don't Decline -- They Just Get Tougher

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. at The American Spectator:
Out of the Wilderness

And, if you haven't read these yet, here's my perspective on a couple of things:
We Want to Fight the Left, But the Republican Establishment is Distracting Us
Death of the Idiot Meme: How the Discussion of “Is She Qualified” Qualifies Palin

Speaking of the stupid "Is she qualified" question, Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC tried to get my great Governor Bob McDonnell of my great commonwealth of Virginia to give her a sound bite. But instead of getting the soundbite that she wanted to hear, she got the soundbite that we want to hear. Ha!

"During an appearance on MSNBC’s 'Andrea Mitchell Reports' Wednesday, Gov. Bob McDonnell [R-VA] said he believes Sarah Palin 'is qualified' to be president: 'I think Sarah Palin’s been a mayor, she’s been governor of a state. I happen to be partial and think governors make great chief executive officers and have the experience to be good chief executive officers of the United States.'" - From Texas4Palin
Quote of the Day (November 11, 2010)

And also from Texas4Palin, Sarah Palin seems to have gotten rave reviews from financial experts for what she has been saying about Quantitative Easing:
Brett Arends: Is Sarah Palin Right About Inflation

Paul Gigot agrees:
Governor Palin "Leading the Pack" on Monetary Policy

Hope you enjoyed the reads. I know, I know. Obama is ruining our country. Hang tight and fight hard. Help is on the way. Sarah Palin is coming.

We Want to Fight the Left, But the Republican Establishment is Distracting Us

-cross posted from my Townhall blog The shining City on a Hill

Okay, here’s the rule: if you are a Republican and want to badmouth Sarah Palin, please step aside and let those of us who have guts lead the charge to take back the Shining City On a Hill. I’m not one for silencing dissenters, but this is war. And the war is against the Left, the Obama agenda and the progressive movement. If you are a Republican, then this is where you need to be fighting. Tearing down Sarah Palin or feeding people false memes about gravitas and polarization only helps the Left and hurts the Republican cause.

Don’t let the liberals define our candidates. Have you not learned the lesson of 2008? In 2008, the Left chose our presidential nominee. They also convinced moderate and independent voters that we needed to move to the center to accommodate a (falsely pushed theme by the media) leftward swing in the electorate. Liberals voted in open primaries and when they couldn’t vote in a GOP primary, they cheered from the sidelines.

Had Huckabee or Romney become our nominee, the Left would have had to deal more directly with the reality that our country still is a center-right country. When McCain was chosen, the Left breathed a collective sigh of relief knowing that the road to the White House would go right past a man speaking to crickets and a few stragglers in a field or a gymnasium somewhere while the “messiah” was packing the house with fainting sheep and gullible lemmings. The GOP Establishment strategy basically was handing it to liberal socialism since it would easily have more credibility if it beat a moderate instead of a conservative.

Then John McCain named Sarah Palin to be his running mate and the Left went nuts. While they would go on to win the election anyway, it took a mobilization of the mainstream media, an orchestrated smear campaign that involved heavy AstroTurfing, the parading of whining cry baby malcontents from Alaska, the full might of Hollywood and a well timed (even if coincidental?) financial crisis to stop the ensuing slide in the polls. Ultimately Obama won by 7 points because those were the people he duped into believing Sarah Palin was not qualified.

This writer put forth early on in 2009 that the strategy for beating Obama in 2012 would not be one that required us to turn 67 million Obama voters around. McCain got 46% of the vote and 58,343,671 people voted for him. Obama got 53% and 66,882,230 votes. That's a spread of 8.5 million. It was and still is this writer’s heartfelt assertion that if you convince enough people that the media lied about John McCain, Sarah Palin and the conservative movement that at worst these people (the 8.5 million) could be won back.

And we were doing such a good job, too.

A couple of weeks ago, those people voted with us. These people are not the hardcore conservatives who were electrified by Sarah Palin, Rick Santelli or Glenn Beck. These are regular folk who hear what both sides have to say and then they go to the polls. They don’t read blogs. They will probably never read this article even if Sean Hannity read it on Fox. They watch the Nightly News. They read newspapers. They work. They have lives. Some of them still think Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house even if they think Obama drove us into the ditch.

So what do we want these people to hear?

We certainly don’t want them to hear that there is friction in the Republican Party because of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement. Yet, every time one of these “Karl Rovian” coordinated attacks are deliberately delivered on Fox News, at the Weekly Standard or (for some odd reason – where Karl Rove works) the Wall Street Journal, somehow those of the ones we want to win back who listen to the mainstream media hear it. I don’t know (shrugging my shoulders like Glenn Beck). Maybe all of a sudden the mainstream media has taken an interest in the Republican Party?

You see, there is friction in the GOP over Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement. But it’s the Establishment that’s causing the friction, not Palin and the Tea Party. When you see “conservative” pundits and political consultants go on TV or take to the keyboard to deliberately bash or underplay Sarah Palin, this is coordinated. This is being orchestrated from within. It’s like Journolist for the right. Read Whitney Pitcher’s article and you tell me if this doesn’t seem coincidental that it is happening in unison and right before we head into 2012 primary season.

I’m not going to name names here. I want bloggers like Whitney, Republican activists and Tea Party activists to do that. But, I will jump into the fray, too, after this. We should plan on slamming anyone who hurts the cause, even if they’re on our side. We should want a lean mean fighting machine going into 2012. I don’t want a bunch of mealy mouthed wussies fighting this battle. We saw how that worked out in 2008, didn’t we?

If there’s going to be a fight then let’s do it now, not on the convention floor for the world to see. Let’s clean house now. The Tea Party has begun its infiltration. Sarah Palin has knocked back the lamestream media. And the Republicans are a majority again. Take notes Establishment types and members of what Ronald Reagan pejoratively called “the Republican Fraternity.” Do you remember 1980? It’s happening again; unless of course you want to turn it into 1976.

Those who ride the Reagan wave which has put silver spoons in their mouths at the expense of forgotten principles or who have earned their wealth on the rebuilding of a compassionate quasi-Rockefeller wing of the GOP while using Reagan as a prop are not understanding something about today’s new and emerging GOP: Homie don’t play that game. True Reaganites would not diss the similar nature of the anti-Establishment theme coming out of the Palin camp. Nor would they break Ronaldus Maximus’ 11^th commandment.

Guys, this is the same Republican establishment that nearly turned this country over to the progressives, the new world order people and the socialists two years ago. How the heck can we allow them to control the GOP narrative or handpick the 2012 nominee again after all their great failures?

There is a very good possibility that the GOP rank and file will choose Sarah Palin to be the nominee should she run. If I was wrong about this, we wouldn’t see the knee-capping and there would be no need to write this article. The establishment is scared she can’t win in 2012 and rightfully so. She can’t win if they undermine her the way they did Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. If the establishment can’t man up, suit up and strap on their gear without fear and stand behind her and help push us to the top, then we are going to have to work that much harder on our end - on the Tea Party end.

It will ultimately be the Establishment’s decision whether the Grand Old Party lives on or chokes on its own caviar.

You know those people who the President said were standing on the side of the road drinking slurpees while everyone else was trying to get the car out of the dish? That’s the Establishment. They’re standing there complaining “she’s not doing it right.” But they sure as hell aren’t lifting a finger to get in there and help.

The Establishment is sipping their fancy drinks with their pinkies stuck up talking in the Glenn Beck “intellectual elite” voice he uses to mock them. They’re saying “those Tea Partiers are useful because they vote for us, but God forbid any one of those rumpled suits or uncouth backwoods women with motor oil under their fingernails gets too much power.” Just look at how they are reacting to Michele Bachmann as she gets closer and closer to a committee chairmanship. They are cowering like sniveling babies in the backroom, but when they come on TV with their white boards and their polished analyses, it’s always about “the good of the party.”

This is not the time to leave the party or go off half cocked complaining about the Establishment by talking third party or getting cynical about politics again. This is about whooping their butts and taking it over. Get their hands off the GOP wheel and we’ll drive. So what if we’re not 100% polished yet and fully vested in Congress. We can’t wait. The last time we waited we went from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. Time is of the essence.

Sarah Palin is willing to lead this fight for us. She has said if she runs, she’ll “be in it to win it.” The woman is willing to go to the matt for us. Let’s do the same for her, our party and our country.

Why would the GOP Establishment make the same stupid mistakes that the liberals have been making for the last two years? The more they bash Palin, the more it drives her to work harder, to become better, to be more aware of her surroundings. She has told us this! It’s odd that those who are so afraid she might run would motivate her even more by egging her on like this.

Some will read this and say, aw shucks, it’s just Palin propaganda. No it’s not. Do you see anything in here that bashes Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich, Santorum or any of the other candidates? No. That’s why we have primaries. That’s why we want the grown ups back in charge so that the whining, the sniveling and the foot kicking will stop – on both sides of the aisle.

Now I’ve figured out why the liberals got so strong. It’s because of the Establishment. The political games, the lip service to conservatism and the fancy suits and fundraisers all mask a crony insider game of musical chairs that gives it to the next in line and sells the electorate on how many points of light there can be or how compassionate they are. And every time the people smell this, they run to the other side.

That’s not my party. My party is represented by the ideals of a great man who once told us that our better days were ahead of us.

Put up or shut up. May the best man or woman win – fair and square.